Copyright regarding creations with high level of creation and the right of deletion

No, not at all.

(To what extent?)

It is a fundamental issue of major concern to any user posting something to which he/she has ownership (and copyright).

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I guess it’s the MIT app inventor forum. Their terms include:

Content you submit to the forum belongs to you, and you decide what permission to give others for it. But at a minimum, you license the company to provide content that you submit to the forum to other users of the forum. That special license allows the company to copy, publish, and analyze content you submit to the forum.

When content you submit is removed from the forum, whether by you or by the company, the company’s special license ends when the last copy disappears from the company’s backups, caches, and other systems. Other licenses you apply to content you submit, such as Creative Commons licenses, may continue after your content is removed. Those licenses may give others, or the company itself, the right to share your content through the forum again.

I’ve emphasised the bit about the licence and when it ends. It might help us understand when the licence ends (and so whether it’s revocable) in the absence of an explicit statement elsewhere.

I looked online briefly about the default position when a copyright licence is not stated to be revocable or irrevocable, and didn’t really get anywhere. It seemed to vary across jurisdictions, in that it was unclear in different ways! But here’s something that should narrow down your search (emphasis in original):

Disputes

US law will govern any dispute related to these terms or your use of the forum.

You and the company agree to seek injunctions related to these terms only in state or federal court in Cambridge, MA. Neither you nor the company will object to jurisdiction, forum, or venue in those courts.

Other than to seek an injunction or for claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, you and the company will resolve any Dispute by binding American Arbitration Association arbitration. Arbitration will follow the AAA’s Commercial Arbitration Rules and Supplementary Procedures for Consumer Related Disputes. Arbitration will happen in San Francisco, California. You will settle any dispute as an individual, and not as part of a class action or other representative proceeding, whether as the plaintiff or a class member. No arbitrator will consolidate any dispute with any other arbitration without the company’s permission.

Any arbitration award will include costs of the arbitration, reasonable attorneys’ fees, and reasonable costs for witnesses. You and the company may enter arbitration awards in any court with jurisdiction.

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First of all, thank you very much for the detailed information, which is largely known to me.

No it is not.

It is a fundamental question for which - in my opinion - one does not have to be a lawyer in order to be able to draw its plausibility and the (actually inevitable) conclusions that can be drawn from it.

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To be more specific now:

I joined Kodular (community) in early 2019.
The only terms (“Terms of Service”) that I acknowledged were the following: Terms of Service - Kodular Docs

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The “Terms and Conditions” were only added later, as can be proven from various sources (e.g. archive.org). → Wayback Machine

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or here: https://github.com/Kodular/kodular.github.io/blob/master/about.html (→ Apr 20, 2022)

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Accordingly, I was not aware of any “Terms and Conditions” and had of course not accepted them at that time (March 2019), so that I should (now) be able to freely decide at any time which of my posts I remove.

Or am I missing something?

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This illustrates why the original advice to speak to a lawyer was wise. A lawyer would have insisted on knowing all the relevant facts before spending time on providing advice.

If you can show that you didn’t agree to the new terms – or, rather, if they can’t show that you did – then you should get what you want as the old terms specially allow it.

The link to the terms on that page was changed on 3 January 2020, after you signed up: Update about.html · Kodular/kodular.github.io@f51f018 · GitHub

That’s an about page, though – what was the link on the signup form?

Did the new terms get circulated at any point? I don’t think Discourse has any way of enforcing agreement to updated terms and conditions. So if you agreed to the old terms on signup then they likely still apply to you.

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Hi @Johannes_Ai2 :slight_smile:

I am unsure how I feel about the inclusion of a specific site in your examples. For now, I have unlisted this topic while I consider the issue.

Ultimately, I am unsure what you wish to achieve with this topic? It seems that we are still somewhat stalled on the lack of legal advice. Is this something you intend to pursue?

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I saw the German copyright act being cited. There is an official translation:

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Good plan :+1:

It was, but the old terms for the specific forum state the laws of the Netherlands apply, and the new terms state Delaware (USA). There will be overlap within the domestic law of EU countries, to be fair.

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That overlap in Europe is because much of the intellectual property law came in via EU directives and was transposed into national law by member states. Nowadays, the European Parliament prefers to enact regulations which apply directly. In part, because there were delays and slippage with the two stage process. Delaware law will be considerably different, despite WIPO and other harmonization efforts.

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We have spent most of this topic meandering through the possible meaning of the standard Discourse terms and the potential consequences of the lack of the word “revocable”.

Now it turns out the forum in question has never used the Discourse terms…

The old terms of the forum explicitly give the right of deletion, and the new terms are equally clear in the other direction.

By posting your Contributions to any part of the Site or making Contributions accessible to the Site by linking your account from the Site to any of your social networking accounts, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to host, use, copy, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, archive, store, cache, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, transmit, excerpt (in whole or in part), and distribute such Contributions (including, without limitation, your image and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Contributions, and grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Now it’s clear that even if a lawyer is consulted the advice won’t be on anything directly relevant to Discourse.

It might make sense to amend the Discourse terms, but that it likely should be in a separate topic.

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Exactly. And from this I conclude that the new guidelines (terms) - not knowing about them in March 2019 - do not (cannot) apply to me.

I just wanted to make sure I didn’t miss anything important.

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Assuming that nothing happened to make them apply to you before you made any given contribution.

If this topic forks to one on terms of service, then I would like to see several variants on offer — including one that is “open”. As is used on the https://forum.openmod.org in which content (text and images), data, and code are appropriately open licensed and each — along with the ToS — requires explicit consent on application. Our site footer contains that information too (scroll down on any page).

So you mean that I not only have to read the ToS when concluding the contract, but also later, after the ToS have been adjusted or new terms (TaC) may have been added.

You can’t really be serious that I have to check before each of my posts whether the terms and conditions have changed.

However, if that were actually the case, it would turn my understanding of the law completely upside down. :upside_down_face:

Do you mean this?

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If so, what do I learn from it?

That those public licenses apply to the material presented on that site, broken down by type as indicated. The abbreviations used are SPDX identifiers, more here:

Meaning that anyone can use and redistribute the material from the site in original or modified form, subject only to the modest obligations contained in the various permissive licenses provided.

The right to deletion applies only insofar as the site administrators (me and two others) agree with such action — and there would have to be very good reason to so. For instance, that the contributor did not have the necessary authority to apply such licenses in the first place. Alternatively, if a contributor merely wanted the material removed so they could republish it elsewhere to better advantage, then that request would be rejected.

As indicated, Discourse should provide this particular legal context as an option for sites who wish to be legally “open”.

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“So you mean that…” (or “So you’re saying that…”) is a rhetorical device often followed by an mischaracterisation of the other person’s position, and this is no exception.

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I am very familiar with rhetorical questions. However, I don’t see what you’re getting at.

So in what respect did I misunderstand you / something?

It may be that you have chosen a practicable and legally valid way to handle this for your website (forum). I can only stick to what I knew as a user of the platform (as well as a former moderator in this forum) at the time of joining and had accepted as a user agreement (due to the existing ToS).